The History of Us (29 page)

Josh made a face of mock confusion. “No idea what you’re talking about,” he said.

Carlos laughed, and then suddenly wore an earnest expression. “Nice to see Addy happy.”

“She’s great,” Josh said.
Addy
.

“She is, yeah.” Carlos winced as if he’d said something inappropriate, as if he’d loaded those words with desire. “Oh, sorry, man,” he said. “She told you we went out, right?”

“Yup,” Josh said.

“I’m drunk. Just tell me to shut the fuck up.”

“No worries,” Josh said. He leaned back against the counter, crossed one ankle over the other, and tried, with this relaxed and casual pose, to counteract how he felt, which was like punching the guy in the face. That whole elaborate display of apology had been just a segue into saying this fact aloud, making sure Josh knew. Maybe not because Carlos still wanted Adelaide. Maybe just because he didn’t want Josh to think he was special. “I guess you understood each other, both being dancers,” Josh said. If they were going to out-nice each other, Josh was going to win.

“That’s true,” Carlos said. “But sometimes you understand too much, you know?”

Josh didn’t. He’d never dated a musician. Why the hell hadn’t he? What kind of life would he now be leading if he’d fallen for a girl in a band?

“You spend a lot of time together,” Carlos said. “Either that’s awesome or it splits you up.”

“Have you ever dated someone who wasn’t a dancer?”

Carlos thought about it, then nodded. “Not for long, though. My girlfriend now is in the San Francisco Ballet.”

“That’s far.”

“Yeah, too far.” He shook his head. “Too close, too far,” he said.

“That’s love for you.”

Carlos laughed, a surprised, appreciative sound. Josh killed it with ballet dancers. He was going to state for the record, based on his limited but profound experience, that ballet dancers were not themselves that funny. Thus their outsize appreciation of his moderate wit. He could make a new life as a stand-up comedian, if ballet dancers could make up the entire crowd.

“We almost broke up a couple months ago,” Carlos said. “Over the distance.”

Josh was a little surprised to be told this. Not that he wasn’t accustomed to unsolicited confidences. Sabrina used to say he should have been a spy or a reporter, the way people told him things. “I don’t ask them to,” he’d say, because she said this like an accusation. She’d roll her eyes and say, “Everything about you asks them to.”

Still, your ex-girlfriend’s date seemed an unlikely confidant. “I’m sorry,” Josh said.

“Yeah.” Carlos looked down at his beer. “I don’t know what will happen.”

“It’s tough,” Josh said. They contemplated uncertainty for a melancholy and weirdly intimate moment. To escape it, Josh lied about having to deliver a drink to Adelaide and left the kitchen with a beer and a glass of wine in his hands.

He turned the wrong way out of the kitchen, maybe on purpose, and instead of correcting himself kept going into Carlos’s study, where all the coats groped each other in a pile on the futon. He took a breath, gulped back some beer, pretended to be checking out the dance magazines on Carlos’s desk. He was about to go back to the party when he heard two voices passing by in the hall. One said, “What will happen if they want you? Will you go?”

The other said, “I don’t know. I’d have to think about it. It would be an amazing opportunity. I can’t not go because of some guy I just met, right?”

That voice was unmistakably Adelaide’s.

He sat on the futon, sinking down into the coats. He took a sip of the beer and then—because why not?—of the wine. It was a weird combination.
Some guy I just met
.

Will you go?

Some guy I just met.

Eloise had always called a melancholy mood the Slough of Despond, and not until he had to read
Pilgrim’s Progress
in a British Lit survey did he realize she hadn’t made that up. It had always seemed such a perfect description, capturing the sludgy, degrading self-pity of those moods. He could see such a slough up ahead, murky and deep. He’d been telling himself that he was unsure of his feelings for Adelaide, but reviewing the situation from among the coats he feared he was very nearly in love. He loved the way her serious aspect could be disrupted by her happy,
goofy smile, as if an early Beach Boys song suddenly started playing in the middle of Mozart’s Requiem.

At Adelaide’s last performance, he’d finally articulated to himself the quality of movement Claire had described. Where Claire was all precise, exacting elegance, Adelaide had an emotive looseness, a melting quality that was at once moving and seductive. She gave the impression of a wildness barely contained. Her body was an expression of joy. Later he’d be unable to stop thinking about the way she moved. In the moment it brought tears to his eyes. This happened to him on occasion with live music, and from time to time he’d tried to pinpoint why beauty without sadness could summon tears. When Adelaide’s piece was over, and he was pressing on his eyelids, pretending he merely had an itch, he imagined asking his sisters why he wanted to cry. Theo would use the word
ephemeral
and probably quote a poet. Claire would say, “You just do.”

That kind of beauty—it was desire and desire fulfilled all at once. He’d had no idea how much he could want to see her leap until she did. And then it was all he’d wanted.

But forget all that—this was the first time he’d used the word
love,
and he’d used it right after hearing her call him “some guy I just met.” Was that a coincidence? Maybe he thought
love
as soon as he saw a challenge to overcome, or a cause for which to martyr himself.

Adelaide was ambitious and independent. They hadn’t been dating that long. Okay, he was hurt, but could he really be surprised? What had she ever done to suggest she needed him, besides falling asleep while he sang? She’d told him—
she’d told him
—that ballet trumped all. Without ballet she wouldn’t exist. But he was still surprised at the idea that she might leave him
behind. Maybe he was surprised by how surprised he was, since he’d understood exactly what she’d meant by
wouldn’t exist
even though he’d pretended not to understand. He’d been telling himself it was only a fact or two about his past he was keeping from her, but sitting there, alternating beer and wine, he had a feeling it was more than that he’d held back. He and she understood each other, but she didn’t know that. Maybe she never would know. She’d disappear in pursuit of her
amazing opportunity,
without the slightest glimmer of how completely he understood.

W
hat should we do in here?” Eloise said to Heather, standing
with her hands on her hips in Heather’s living room. She’d spent the last two weeks at Heather’s house, which felt rather like traveling, being in a hotel or more accurately a bed-and-breakfast, carefully cluttered with objects and throw pillows to make it look like home. She might have been happy to live that way indefinitely, pretending she didn’t really live anywhere. But that morning, as they were drinking their coffee in the kitchen, Heather had suggested they consider what things of Eloise’s they should bring over, how to combine their stuff and their lives, and then she’d quoted George Carlin on the meaning of life being about finding a place to put your stuff. Eloise could see that Heather meant this joke not only as truth but as message: Eloise needed to really, truly, finally move in, so Heather could really, truly, finally be happy. So Eloise had agreed immediately, because hesitation about this project might have suggested hesitation about Heather, and she was not going to suggest that now, not now or ever again.

She looked over the two couches—one large, one small, both extremely poofy—and the blocky coffee table and the enormous
painting of overlapping circles made by one of Heather’s artist friends. She’d just as soon leave it be. It was hard to see how her stuff was going to mix with this stuff. “Hmmm,” she said. She tried to say it enthusiastically.

Heather came up behind her and slipped her hands through the triangles of Eloise’s arms. She slid a palm under the front of Eloise’s shirt and rested her chin on Eloise’s shoulder. “We should get rid of that love seat,” she said. “And bring your couch over.”

“My couch is orange,” Eloise said.

“I know,” Heather said, sliding her palm over Eloise’s breast.

“Your couch is purple,” Eloise said.

“So?”

“We’re going to have an orange couch and a purple couch? In the same room?”

Heather put a light kiss on Eloise’s jawbone. “Why not?” she said. “We’re wild and crazy.”

“Are we?”

“Our tastes are really different,” Heather said. “It’ll be more mix and mix than mix and match.”

“We don’t have to bring my stuff over,” Eloise said.

“No, no! I want to.”

“Because this has all been an elaborate plan to get my stuff,” Eloise said, smiling. “I can’t believe you really want it.”

“I really want it,” Heather said, with deliberate innuendo, turning Eloise toward her.

Before Eloise left for work, she agreed to meet Heather at her own house that afternoon to consider furniture and kitchenware. She didn’t want combining their lives to be such a daunting and lengthy project. She wanted it to be boom, done, but until she
moved her stuff in Heather wouldn’t consider it official. Heather wouldn’t consider it official until Eloise told the kids, but the piping little voice that reminded her of that could just shut the hell up, because there was no need to discuss your personal life with people who weren’t going to be part of it. And the voice that said that they
would,
inevitably, be part of it—well, that voice could shut the hell up, too.

The day promised a distractingly annoying series of meetings, and Eloise found herself looking forward to discussing with Marta Bowen for the millionth time why Marta had to take her turn at teaching Monday/Wednesday/Friday, just like the rest of the faculty. At ten of ten, there was a knock on Eloise’s office door, and she turned expecting to see Marta’s scowling face, and instead saw a man in a suit, a very pale man in a suit, regarding her somberly. “Yes?” she said, with curt politeness, because he had the air of someone who mistook her for someone else.

“Are you Eloise?” he asked, which was strange, because a work-related stranger would have asked whether she was Professor Hempel, or Dr. Hempel, or the department chair.

“I am,” she said.

“I’m Gary Paula.”

“Gary Paula?” she repeated blankly.

He looked very uncomfortable, the man in his recognizably expensive suit. “I’m Claire’s boyfriend.”

She stared at him, dumbfounded. He might as well have told her he was the second coming, or an alien. “Claire’s
boyfriend
?” she said. That did not seem like the right word.

“I need to talk to you,” he said, and when she didn’t answer he went on looking uncomfortable, but advanced into the office anyway and took the chair nearest her desk, as though she’d invited
him to. He leaned forward and looked at her intently, as if he was considering whether to offer her a job.

“I can’t imagine what we have to talk about,” she said.

Both his expression and his tone dismissed that assertion. “Claire’s unhappy,” he said.

“Really.” She sat back in her chair and tented her fingers. “What a surprise.”

Another dismissive face. He seemed to have been braced for that blow. “I don’t think it’s about me,” he said. “I think it’s about you.”

“Is that right,” Eloise said. “
That
surprises me.”

“Well, it shouldn’t,” he said. “You are her mother.”

There was accusation in his voice when he said the word
mother
. Wasn’t there? Eloise was sure she heard it, but she wasn’t proud of her childish response. “I am not.”

“Essentially you are,” he said. “So of course it’s hard for her to be treated like this by you.”

“Treated like what?”

“Like she’s nothing to you,” he said. “Like you don’t want to see her. Like you’ve disowned her.”

At those words Eloise vaulted out of anger into contempt, noting the nervous way his leg began to jiggle, even as he held her gaze. She cocked her head and studied him, enjoying the power of detachment. This was how the world must look from the throne. She spoke slowly, biting her words. “I cannot imagine what kind of self-righteous jackass you must be to come here under these circumstances to tell me how to treat my niece. You left your wife and your three-year-old child for a girl just out of high school. You surely knew that girl, young enough to be your own daughter, had lied not only to her employer but to her family
about her whereabouts. You surely knew what kind of opportunity that girl was giving up for the dubious prospect of marriage to you. Let me say again, you allowed her to quit her life for you, while you abandoned your wife and child. That is the kind of person that you are. And yet here you sit, like you have something to say to me.”

Now he had the good grace to flush, red splotches appearing on his cheeks and neck. “What kind of person I am,” he said, “isn’t the question.”

“It’s the question in my mind,” Eloise said.

“I understand why you don’t like me,” he said.

“Well, ten points for you.”

“And I understand why you’re angry at Claire.”

“Congratulations, again.”

“But I can’t imagine that you don’t still care about her, and that is why I came here to talk to you, because I would imagine it would bother you as much as it does me to see her in pain. She misses her family. She feels like she’s lost you. She’s been sleeping a lot. She’s had little appetite. She cries. She’s been like that ever since that dinner at your house.”

Eloise nodded. She could feel the anger surging back. “It must be a terrible blow to leave your wife for a teenage girl, only to have that girl turn out to be kind of a drag.”

He stood, as though shoved to his feet by righteous indignation. “She needs you,” he said.

Eloise looked up at him and said, “She has you, doesn’t she?”